I got an e-mail last night that got me thinking. It was from someone who’d taken exception to the language I used in my latest “Dear White People…” post. At issue were many interrelated things, but one primary concern expressed to me was my choice of the pronoun “you” when I spoke to and about white people. One point brought home to me was that at least this person in specific felt like those “you” pronouns were calling em out to speak on behalf of all white people.

I want to say a little bit about both language and rhetoric in my essays as well as my feelings about my allies, and finally touch a little on tokenizing and being tokenized (i.e. being called upon to speak for a group either in a formal or an informal capacity).

First, I want to say that when I am not in a ranting/essay-writing/fuck-the-Man sort of mood, I tend to be pretty good about feeling like I have a multitude of allies in my various fights against -isms, in the form of friends and family (both bio-family and extended adult family). Heck, I even have some pretty solid acquaintances whom I can count on to have my back during racial (or other -ism-centric) debates/wars/flamewars. It’s cool.

The way I figure it is that if you’ve got both (a) a reasonable talent for critical thinking and (b) some experience in the trenches of being on the short end of some minority stick, you’re probably pretty reliable. After all, you’ve been through a minority life-experience, you’ve probably experienced some pretty random and avoidable hardships (all things being equal, which you know they’re not), and you can probably derive from that experience a pretty fair and just attitude about other people’s disadvantages too.

So that’s “Us”.

Here’s “Them”:

Rhetoric. I use it a lot when I write/speak about political issues. Why do I do so? Because it helps me figure out appropriate communication strategies when I do get feedback. Rhetoric can be employed to help self-select certain kinds of populations for certain kinds of responses.

Take for instance my use of the rather ambiguous pronoun, “you” in the Dear White People post I referenced above.

It’s a neat little word. Just looking at it in a particular context, you (singular, individual - the reader) can usually figure out which meaning it has, but at the very least, it can be used in a collective/plural sense and in a singular sense. In any sense, it’s certainly possible that when I use it I could be talking about a group that you (singular, individual - the reader) belong to.

My rhetorical use of the word “you” is very intentional. I have found that it’s very effective in separating out people who are inclined to take ambiguous contexts personally from those who are not inclined to. What I mean is that it’s usually the folks that have issues and insecurities that project that “you” onto themselves and take it personally. Conversely, folks who are pretty together and have a good sense of self, direction and a general lack of something to be guilty about usually don’t take that ambiguous “you” personally.

Now, I realize that this system isn’t perfect, and like cops at chase scenes, there are some times where the wrong person (with an equally guilty conscience about something entirely unrelated to the scene of this crime) runs from the scene, muddying the crime-investigation waters. But in rhetoric you (singular, individual, hypothetical - the writer) think and strategize toward large-scale interpretive cultural and social patterns, and cannot really target a particular essay to a particular person or type of person. In general, the dynamic plays out well and helps me figure out folks who happen to respond to me.

This is where tokenizing or being called upon to be the token for your particular cultural or ethnic group comes in. With respect to the “Dear White People” post, I tend to believe that someone who feels like I was speaking personally to them in that post is someone who’s likely to have a forboding sense that I was asking them to speak for their white culture. However, I wasn’t doing that. I was employing a rhetorical device. That folks felt guilty because of it seems to me to be all in their minds, or at least mostly.

Believe me, I’ve been in situations too where I was called upon to represent an entire class or gender or race that I didn’t really feel I was representative of, and it is terribly uncomfortable.

In this case, though, I have to say that it’s really in your head, and if you end up feeling called out by any of my essays where I don’t mention names, that feeling really is something you’re generating for yourself. There is no spoon, Neo.

Tags:   activism · allies · isms · language · rhetoric · The Man · tokenizing · tokensNo Comments